Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the entire internet?

McCourt, who says he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s CEO, is unique among the group of potential buyers. To begin with, he has been steadfast in public, expressing his desire to buy the app in print and television interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” reportedly Trump’s favorite show. He is also the only potential buyer so far promising to serve the public interest — addressing not only geopolitical concerns about the app, but also the harmful effects it has been shown to have on young users. But there are skeptics about the viability of a “people’s command.” According to Adam Kovacevich, a Democratic tech lobbyist, “the obstacles to Project Liberty’s acquisition of TikTok are enormous.” Even if China allows a sale to go through, Project Liberty would be competing with a list of potential buyers that could include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Musk’s X. “I think it’s been kind of an opportunistic way to gain visibility. their original mission of healthier social media,” Kovacevich said of Project Liberty. But, he added, “a nonprofit will be outbid.”

In November, just a few weeks after Trump’s victory, Project Liberty kicked off “The Summit on the Future of the Internet” at the McCourt School of Public Policy, which McCourt gave at Georgetown University, his alma mater. The event was an example of McCourt’s billionaire connecting power, bringing together those with common interests who don’t often see each other face-to-face: 400 attendees including politicians like Amy Klobuchar, Ro Khanna and Nancy Mace; technologists like Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin; TikTok creators; think tanks; and grieving parents. Brandon Guffey, a Republican representative in the South Carolina Legislature whose teenage son killed himself after becoming the victim of a sexual blackmail on Instagram, sat a few feet away from me during the opening remarks. McCourt roamed the stage in a dark knit turtleneck and jeans, a small headset attached to his ear. “You’re going to hear the word ‘data’ mentioned over and over and over again,” he said. “Every time you hear that, I ask you to think ‘personality.’ Your data is you in the digital age. Don’t you want to own yourself?”

By and large, Project Liberty is part of the movement towards a decentralized social internet, where no single network controls users’ data, and instead users can move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. The idea is to create “interoperability”, which in theory would give users greater agency; if they don’t like the tone or content moderation of a site, they can move to another relatively seamlessly without losing followers. The term “fediverse” is often applied to the corpus of websites, including Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, that use decentralized, interoperable systems. Bluesky, while not technically in fediverse – it doesn’t use the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse sites do – is a spiritual cousin and can easily connect to fediverse with services like Bridgy Fed. Project Liberty suggests that its own contribution to the decentralized internet, the Decentralized Social Network Protocol, or DSNP, could be used in ridesharing apps and on social media to enable creators to “manage their identity” and “avoid being deplatformed. “

So far, only social media site MeWe has fully adopted Project Liberty’s DSNP, having migrated around 1.5 million users to it; Bluesky currently has more than twenty seven million users. “DSNP has a reputation as vaporware,” said one technologist who wished to remain anonymous because they had received funding from Project Liberty. The primary reason McCourt wants to buy TikTok is to acquire its user base and transfer its members and their data to Project Liberty’s decentralized protocol; he insists he doesn’t need the app’s algorithm. “I have no interest in maintaining a version of TikTok that just replicates the algorithm and scrapes people’s data,” McCourt told me. His version of the app would help “build an alternative internet, and then other people should move in this direction because that’s what the marketplace wants.”

But details about what a Project Liberty-owned version of TikTok might actually look like are scarce. “The transition to this new infrastructure would be designed to minimize disruption for TikTokers,” promised a recent press release from the group, though the experience of the app would undoubtedly change without its algorithm. This seems to some in the industry a backward approach to solving the problems of social media. “McCourt seems to be saying, ‘Let’s use my money to acquire users,'” the technologist said. “Bluesky said, ‘We’re just building the product, we’re building the Twitter replacement, and when people are going to leave, they’re going to come here. ‘ ” (When I asked McCourt about this line of criticism, he said: “First of all, I’m not parachuted in. I’ve been working on this for more than ten years. And second, if they don’t agree. or appreciate it , they just don’t engage in it.”)

I asked Graber, the Bluesky CEO, about Project Liberty’s pitch. “I think everybody who’s in the interoperability conversation is saying, ‘Well, you’re going to use my protocol and then we’re going to be interoperable with everybody,'” she said. “DSNP is very opinionated. It specifies a way you do data, a way you do identity. I’m concerned about its scalability. But if you want to test it, go ahead. We’re not a blocker of that .” Still, she shared some of the concerns about DSNP’s adoption strategy. “I tend to approach things from, like, ‘Where’s the adoption?’ and ‘What’s a pragmatic approach to doing things?’ Graber told me. “Trying to set a protocol standard for everyone before there’s widespread adoption means you might also be wrong about what you’re standardizing around.”

When it came to TikTok, Graber seemed most interested in the fate of the company’s algorithm. “A lot of the controversy is driven by how the algorithm works and the fact that there’s only one algorithm and it can be quite addictive,” she said. Bluesky allows users to customize their own social media algorithms. Similarly, a divested, US-owned TikTok might not have the same kind of novel, surprising content as the current version, but it could give users more freedom to choose what kind of content they want to see. People could e.g. choose an algorithm for cute animals or one that pushed beauty tips. “I think opening up algorithms to a marketplace of algorithms is a really healthy intervention to make,” Graber told me. “Just make it really easy for most users, give them the ability to choose, and then make sure the data is open.”

Project Liberty used the summit to launch another technology initiative, what the group calls Log in with Liberty, a way to surf the Internet as a data-autonomous individual without having to divulge personal information. On the second day of the conference, Braxton Woodham, a co-creator of Project Liberty’s DSNP protocol, played me a short video about how the new service would work. “Imagine a unique online identity that belongs to you, one where you control how other companies interact with your data, where you own your connections and content across applications,” said a voice-over showing a woman typing about his trip to Miami on two separate social media platforms. “Join us on the People’s Internet and sign in with Liberty.” The video ended, but I remained unclear as to what “signing in with Liberty” meant. Woodham, a rocket scientist by training who was previously chief technology officer at Fandango, recalled how Facebook and Google have tried to get users to log into various sites using proprietary accounts. Project Liberty wanted to provide a non-corporate alternative to this kind of login. An acquisition of TikTok would allow the group to offer this option to millions of users.

Signing in with Liberty, Woodham continued, may eventually resemble something like the Energy Star logo on home appliances, indicating energy-efficient products. Most consumers don’t know exactly what the Energy Star label means, but they like their appliances to have it. “We’re looking at the change at the consumer level more that way,” Woodham said. “It’s not a revealing move.” It was more about gradually changing expectations.

At the Cape, McCourt was eager to show me the full extent of his property. We hopped on a golf cart and drove down from the main house, across the street and into a wooded area filled with tall pines, where McCourt, a self-proclaimed “rockhead”—as in, he loves granite—has erected a series of stone installations of own design. One piece, a sphere that appears to float as summer ferns grow around it, was completed in 2019, shortly after the death of his mother, aged one hundred and two, and the birth of one of his sons. The period seemed to crack something open in McCourt. It was the same year he began planning Project Liberty. “I don’t know if it was having the confidence or the maturity or the ability to express myself in a way that spoke to the journey I felt I was on,” he told me.

We drove to a small hill located in the forest. McCourt stopped at a stone wall with a poem he had written engraved on it. “It’s about seeing what you haven’t seen before,” he said. “It was there, but you didn’t see it.” People always seem to be moving, he said, restless, but perhaps not “listening and observing and really absorbing.” We walked down a small slope, past a dry stone wall and into a Zen garden with a lily pond. He instructed me to pose for a picture under the archway where he told me Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web – and supporter of Project Liberty – had also stood.

As we walked out of the garden, I asked McCourt if Project Liberty was in part an act of penance for past missteps. No penance, he told me. But he thinks about his work through the lens of magnanimity, the concept popularized by Thomas Aquinas and later Ignatius of Loyola. “It’s the idea of ​​doing what’s necessary,” he said. “So if it is necessary to be subordinate and wash someone else’s feet, then you do it. If it is necessary to do something very brave, that is what you do.” I found myself imagining what Aquinas might have thought of a TikTok commandment.

At the Project Liberty summit, McCourt had seemed concerned that his broader Internet project was being subsumed by the buzz surrounding the app’s sales. “The way the media works is that it focuses on the issues of the moment,” he said. “And that’s both good and bad.” The speculation surrounding TikTok, he acknowledged, had “raised” the profile of Project Liberty. But on the Cape, he seemed as uncertain as anyone about what might happen to the app after January 19. “I think it’s going to sell,” McCourt said as he drove the golf cart through a huge lawn. “Now let it out — is it an insider-like deal and nothing changes except the ownership? Or is it, you know, not an insider deal and everything changes because it’s an opportunity to start fixing the Internet , not just fix TikTok?

McCourt’s political donations have largely been to Democratic candidates, but he remains optimistic about the incoming administration. Some of Project Liberty’s technical projects rely on blockchain to allow users to move and control their online identity from site to site. During the campaign, Trump promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” “I think with Trump, projects like this just got a huge, huge boost because of his belief in blockchain,” McCourt told me. “It’s far bigger for this project than TikTok.” (He later told me that the Musk rumor was notable because it was the first public indication that the Chinese might be open to a sale.)